Birding with Benefits

Chapter 17

It was going to be a long morning.

Especially if John kept putting on those reading glasses to peer at his phone. They transformed him from an attractive outdoorsman to the buttoned-up lumberjack librarian Celeste wanted to pull apart. But she wouldn’t be pulling apart a single thing, because she was totally cool.

Though she did release a long-held breath when he whipped the glasses off and stowed them safely in his front pocket.

He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “So, what’s the difference between a story and a post? And why do they both exist?”

If anything could pull her mind out of the gutter, it was this challenge. Celeste possessed over a decade of educational experience and was a two-time nominee for southern Arizona teacher of the year, but this was her greatest test yet.

She was trying to teach John to use Instagram.

“Posts are bigger statements, things you really want to last. A story is for stuff you want to share but doesn’t necessarily have the gravity of a post. It will only stay up for a day.”

John’s brows pulled together tight. This was probably how she looked when Morgan tried to explain TikTok algorithms. “We’ll get there,” she assured him. “By the end of today, you’ll be ready to take the social media world by storm. Starting with the scavenger hunt.” Each item on the list, when posted with the right hashtags, would earn them one point when the contest was done. They had the next three weeks to complete it, but they’d decided to get some done that long morning.

She’d walked him through creating a profile yesterday afternoon, happy to have a reason to make innocent contact in their post-kiss reality. They’d exchanged perfectly harmless, totally flirt-free texts about social media for an hour. She’d even limited herself to using only the thumbs-up emoji to make sure nothing could be misinterpreted. Perfect groundwork laid for a very normal birding expedition at this sprawling urban park.

Tugging the phone from his hand, Celeste perused the blank profile page for John M.

“I thought you were going to make this a business account? Use the name of your guiding company?”

“I don’t have a name for that yet,” he grumbled. “And it’s not the right time to launch it now anyway, with the contest underway.”

“What about… Walks for Warblers?” Celeste said. “Or Hikes with Hummingbirds?” She loved alliteration. She had done a whole unit on it for her students in the fall. Her free fingers tapped her knee as she waved John’s phone in the air, imagining the possibilities. “Trails for Titmice? Is the plural of ‘titmouse’ actually ‘titmice’? Or ‘titmouses’? But maybe you don’t want ‘tit’ in the name of your business.”

“Celeste.”

“Or we forget the alliteration and make the branding all about you. John Maguire, master craftsman, birder extraordinaire.”

“I’m not sure—”

“Yes, I can see it!” She could take some photos of him for his profile, maybe even some with those reading glasses. Clients would probably line up just to take a walk with him.

John spoke so honestly and beautifully about birds, trees, bugs, everything. If he could convey even a fraction of that in a post, he’d have potential clients eating out of his hand.

Maybe even some nice, bird-interested woman who wasn’t carrying a marriage’s worth of baggage. John deserved that when he was ready—a satisfying relationship with someone who could see the full complexity behind the quiet package, and tap into the deepest, sweetest parts of him.

Someone who would do more for him than try to kiss him out of her system.

But she was getting ahead of herself. “Getting these photos up there for the contest will be your first step. Then we can go over the best birding hashtags and the latest trends and—”

“Celeste. Stop, please.” A pained groan rumbled from his throat. “This isn’t how I want to do this. I just want to go birding.”

She patted his knee, just once. “But this is about birding, John. This is how people do it now. Have you even looked at the Bird Binge hashtag?” Celeste checked it nightly, tracking how other teams were doing, though no one gave away much about their numbers. These birders were cagey.

Celeste typed #birdbinge into John’s Instagram search bar. The grid of results showed birders of all ilks smiling in selfies for the camera, and plenty of photos of birds on their own.

“Look? See!” She waved the phone between them. “People can post pictures of the birds they see, and—” Her voice caught in her throat as one picture caught her eye. It was Breena, smiling big at the camera, her cheek pressed against a very familiar cinnamon beard.

Celeste tapped the photo and read the caption.

#ThrowbackThursday to the first year I won the Bird Binge. I came in hot and I’m only getting hotter. Watch out, newbies, and stay in your lane! #BirdBinge

Only a slice of John’s face had made it into Breena’s post, but Celeste studied it nonetheless, marking the small difference between John then and the one beside her. The small lines around his hazel eyes were more pronounced now, and there was a little more sugar threaded through his beard.

“What the hell?” he muttered, pulling the phone from her hand. “That’s me!”

“Uh, yeah, the beard kinda gives it away.” Celeste chuckled. “Nice touch leaving you in just enough to be obvious. I believe she is goading you, John. Throwing down the gauntlet about the contest.”

He stared at the picture for another moment as one hand scrubbed at his beard. “No, she knows how I am with social media stuff. She knows I’d never see this without someone showing it to me.” He tapped the phone, flinching when his movement made the picture take up the whole screen, then quickly made the whole thing go black. “It’s more likely she’s goading you.”

“Oh.” Watch out, newbies, and stay in your lane. “Of course.” Somewhere between her first hike with John and her arrival at the park that morning, she’d stopped thinking of herself as a newbie. She studied, she watched, she knew stuff. Hell, she’d made the Tweethearts champions.

But most of all, John didn’t treat her like a newbie or like someone holding him back. He treated her like an equal.

“Stay in my lane,” she muttered, pushing her sneaker into the dry grass. “Like I even see the lane markings—please. I go where I want.”

She shouldn’t have been thrilled by the laugh that shook John beside her, or the way the low vibration of it hit her right in the gut. Not when this morning in the park was all about moving past their kiss. But her body was not getting the message.

She grabbed his upper arm and pulled them both up, congratulating herself for letting go of him quickly. “Okay. You don’t want to be a social media influencer, I get it. That’s a battle for another day. But today you’ve got to at least take these pictures and post them. We cannot let Breena go unanswered.”

John’s eyes narrowed at her, but a smile still pushed up his cheeks. “You’re a little scary when you get competitive, you know that?”

“You don’t know the half of it.” She pulled her own phone out to consult the scavenger hunt list. “Morgan won’t even do puzzles with me anymore. Now, where do we start?”

Some of the items had been easy: native plants John and Celeste identified and photographed quickly, and a few common birds captured in flight. Other things on the list required a little more creativity, but even though John swore he only saw an oblong blob where Celeste saw a flamingo, he’d agreed to take the photo for “a cloud that looks like a bird.”

And through all of it, Celeste had kept an entirely respectable distance from John. And if she’d heard him clear his throat when she’d bent over to admire a wildflower on the ground, it was only because the air that day was particularly dry.

Because John was cool, too. So there was no way he’d be checking out her ass.

“Okay,” Celeste said, assessing what they had left. “We probably have time to get one more today.” Given Breena’s post, she knew just which one it should be. “Team selfie with a bird?”

John’s eyes narrowed as a smile drifted over his lips. “Is this you goading back?”

“Me?” She flattened a palm against her chest. “I would never. I just want to support the ornithological society by posting as many pictures as we can.”

“Right. So let’s find a bird and get our selfie. How hard can that be?”

Very hard, it turned out. An Abert’s towhee scraped in the dirt for seeds beneath a saltbush, but when Celeste crooked her finger at John and dipped into a low squat in front of the bird, it quickly departed. Same with a lesser goldfinch, which drank weightlessly from a pink penstemon flower until John’s boot crunched a stick into the ground.

After a few more thwarted attempts, Celeste was sneaking up on a bush full of chattering sparrows when John’s hand brushed her shoulder, lifting off so fast his touch was only a breeze. When she turned, he was pointing to a nearby palo verde, where a white-winged dove sat peacefully on a sloppy nest of twigs.

Celeste kept her voice quiet. “Okay, I think this is our chance.” She motioned for his phone, confident she had more experience taking selfies than he did. She fiddled with the camera app before stretching her arm out in front of them. “I put it on photo burst so it’ll take a whole bunch of pictures in a row, to make sure we get a good one.”

She scooted closer to him, then closer still, until their shoulders pushed together and they were mirrored on his phone screen. He must have been working early in his shop, because his smell was all sawdust and fresh pine.

If she could caption that smell, it would say Eat Your Heart Out, Breena.

Thinking purely of needling Breena, she nestled even closer to John, keeping the dove in the frame just over his shoulder.

She took in a slow, steady breath. “Ready?”

But just after she pressed the button, a woodpecker called from the air above them, and Celeste couldn’t help tipping her head back to watch it pass. She loved the way they streaked across the sky, dipping down between the beats of their wings.

When it disappeared from view, she looked back at the phone. They were smiling together on the screen, cheeks almost touching. The striations of John’s eyes matched the greens and browns of the tree behind them.

The dove cooed and shifted on her nest, and he turned to look. When his head shifted, Celeste’s did as well, but she didn’t look as far back as the bird. Instead, her eyes snagged on the cut of John’s jaw, his beard shining in the sunlight, and the tan skin of his neck just below. Her tongue swiped along her bottom lip, wondering how he would taste, right there.

She stepped away, sending John tumbling into the empty space she’d left. He righted himself, clearing his throat. “Did we, uh, get one?”

She tugged at her ponytail. Cool, cool, just be cool. Finally, she nodded. “The phone took a bunch of pictures, so we must have, right?”

John stood behind her, far enough that she could hear his breathing but not feel it as he looked over her shoulder. She scrolled through the burst of photos. Several were of them getting into position, then a few of them looking at the camera without smiles. Celeste swiped through pictures quickly, but her hand froze when one image took over the screen.

In the picture, Celeste was looking up into the sky, her neck stretched. And John was looking right at her, his gaze clearly focused on her mouth. His lids were low, lips pulled in tight between his teeth.

Behind her, his breathing stopped.

Celeste’s thumb hovered over the photo, her heart straining against her sternum. But she managed to keep her hand steady, and when she finally swiped again, she took them through a group of photos of the two of them smiling with the nesting dove in the background. She lingered on each image, slowing her breathing.

But the pictures changed again as she scrolled forward, each frame another still in a slow-motion movie. First, their smiles at the camera. Then a change behind them, the bird shifting its body. Then John turning to look, bit by bit.

In the last photo of the burst, Celeste’s eyes were on John, her expression wearing every thought she’d had about him since their encounter on the wall. Every gasped memory, every brush of her hand against her own skin as she thought of him, every filthy item on the list of things she’d do to him given one more chance. Everything she’d tied up and locked away to come to the park this morning, utterly cool.

Light-headed, she teetered back, but was caught by the hot spread of John’s palm across her back. He steadied her on her feet as she fumbled with his phone, almost dropping it in her attempts to turn off the screen, then shoved it into his hands before taking a few steps back. “We got some great ones in the middle there. You can figure out the posting later. I bet Chris would be awesome at that stuff, right? You probably don’t need my help.”

John blinked, then nodded and slipped his phone into his pocket. “Yeah, he would probably love that.”

“Okay.” She nodded, then nodded again.

“Okay.”

They opened their mouths at the same time.

“So I—”

“I should probably—”

“I’ve got papers to grade.”

John nodded. “Stuff to do in my workshop.”

She nodded back. “You gotta work that wood.”

Celeste simply let her jaw hang open. And the morning had started out with such promise. She was ready to race-walk to her car when she remembered Maria’s party. Maria’s stupid, wonderful, obligatory party to which she’d promised to bring John as her fake date.

“Um. Maria’s party is this Sunday,” she blurted. “And you said you’d go, but I know that was before—” Before you declined to grind your erection on me the other night? That would not be the cool thing to say. “I could just tell people you’re busy or something, that you couldn’t come after all.”

“Is that what you’d prefer? To go alone?”

“No.” She answered honestly. But it wasn’t because she craved his company, because that would be very uncool of her. “Andrea will pounce at the first opportunity of seeing me alone, and Maria will be busy and it’s good to have an ally at these things. If you’re okay still coming, that would be really great.”

He kicked the ground. “Then yeah, I’m happy to still come along.”

“Cool.” And just like that, she realized what the problem had been all morning, beyond John’s reading glasses.

They’d pretended their kissing hadn’t happened, instead of addressing it head-on like cool, mature adults. They were dancing around something they could just lay out in the open.

“And about last time…” She worked to dislodge the frog wedged in her throat. “I think it really worked like a charm. I don’t know about you, but I’m basically over the whole thing.” Not her most convincing performance, but this was a fake-it-till-you-make-it moment.

John just nodded. When he spoke, his voice was flat. “Same. I’m just happy to concentrate on the contest.”

“Cool.” Celeste took a backward step toward the parking lot, catching her foot on a rock and swinging her arms for balance. “I’ll text you the details of the party, and we’ll figure out our costumes.”

She’d meant to plan their costumes long ago, but somewhere between jumping into a mountain pond, learning how to identify a Lucy’s warbler, listening to birds in her backyard with John, and… doing other things she really needed to stop thinking about, the whole thing had slipped her mind.

He was backing away too, hands in his pockets. “Yeah, absolutely. Sounds good.”

“Cool!” she said way too loudly, curling the notebook in her hand until her fingers ached. “Okay. See ya. Bye.”

John was already halfway across the park when she realized she’d failed to delete the evidence from his phone that she was, in fact, not cool at all.